The first wave of globalization (1830-1914) witnessed a decline in the number of countries from 125 to 54. Political consolidation was often achieved through war and conquest. The second wave of globalization (1950-present) has led instead to an increase in the number of countries to a record...

Governments fighting terrorists have many tactical options, yet these options often yield unintended and counterproductive consequences. This paper models a terrorist organization, a religious group from which the terrorists recruit suicide bombers, and the society in which the terrorists are...

We develop and test an economic theory of insurgency motivated by the informal literature and by recent military doctrine. We model a three-way contest between violent rebels, a government seeking to minimize violence by mixing service provision and coercion, and civilians deciding whether to...

Research on insurgency has been invigorated this past decade by better data, improved methods, and the urgency of understanding active engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan. This empiricists' insurgency reinforces a classic literature on the essential role of civilians while challenging older...

We develop a dynamic theory of resource wars and study the conditions under which such wars can be prevented. The interaction between the scarcity of resources and the incentives for war in the presence of limited commitment is at the center of our theory. We show that a key parameter...